Hypnosis for Bed Wetting

Nocturnal Enuresis (or Night Time Bed Wetting as most people know it) is something that affects a large amount of children – and it isn’t only limited to young people. The truth is that many adults also deal with urinary incontinence on a regular basis. This can be hard for a person to deal with emotionally, and so it is something that we see in therapy very often, in fact, hypnosis is considered by many doctors to be a very effective treatment and adjunct to other therapies so as a hypnotherapist it is a very common thing that I work with.

The statistics overwhelmingly show that young males are significantly more prone to this issue than females, and it is believed that there is often a hereditary component to many of the cases – Apparently if the child’s father suffered from enuresis the chances are much higher that their children will also wet the bed. But the thing to remember here is that statistics show only 5%-10% of bed wetting cases are caused by a medical condition. So there is often a deeper mental and emotional issue here behind the obvious symptom of bed-wetting. Often times the person may just be sleeping very deeply, so deeply that the “alarm” the full bladder normally sends that will awaken a person before an accident happens goes unheard. The most common component that I see in my office however is some component of Secondary Gain (also called “Secondary Benefit Syndrome”). Think about it like this: If a child wets the bed and mom gets up in the middle of the night to come be with you, cleans you up, and then takes you to bed with her and dad where you will feel safe, there is a sort of “emotional reward” system in place. This is not what is happening in every case of course, but it is something that is very common. Of course the child doesn’t consciously make a decision to wet the bed, it is done on a subconscious level, and if this is the reason behind the bed-wetting hypnosis will be very effective at helping you to manage the issue, especially if you are also using traditional approaches and following doctor recommendations.

But every case is different, so it is important to treat the person as an individual in every case. The cause of bed-wetting will be different every time with just a few common “themes”. As you know I am a big research nut so here are the results of two clinical studies done on the effectiveness of hypnotherapy for bed-wetting:

The first was a study of general suitability of hypnosis for treatment of enuresis and how it compared to treatment with different amounts of medication. The study was carried out over a six-month period, it involved 48 males ranging in age from 8-13 years old. According to the study hypnosis was very effective at treating the bed wetting (and interestingly enough inducing “trance” wasn’t even necessary in many cases. They probably used conversational hypnosis techniques like what I mentioned on the phone in the case of the therapist that successfully helped a young client to stop wetting the bed by simply talking about baseball). You can see the abstract of the study HERE: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1469-7610.1985.tb01635.x/abstract

Another study was conducted with twelve boys aged 8-16 years old, after 6 sessions it was found that hypnosis had long-lasting effects for chronic and complex enuresis. The doctors even went on to say that they would recommend hypnosis to be included in every bed-wetting therapy. Out of the twelve boys 9 were able to achieve and maintain 6-7 dry nights per week, the other three boys had either legitimate physical conditions requiring surgery or additional anxiety issues originating from within the family that exacerbated the problem. You can see the abstract of the study HERE: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14983195

As you can see hypnosis is great for helping with bed-wetting no matter what age you are. If you’d like to make the change pick up the phone and call 424-27-THINK (424-278-4465). I look forward to meeting you soon!